One of the fastest growing startups today, Slack is the powerhouse messaging app used by remote teams. Its powerful integrations, numerous bots, and the ecosystem being built on top of the platform have quickly transformed it into one of the most flexible communication tools on the market.

At its core, Slack operates in channels. A company can create channels to track and archive conversations around teams and projects in order to get things done. Slack’s search feature ensures that you will never “lose” a conversation about a project.

One of the biggest reasons that Skype is the most popular communication tool is that it’s free.

Skype allows audio and video calls between multiple devices. In other words, one person could be on a laptop and another can be on their phone. One of the most prominent features we use here at Time Doctor is the group call. We routinely have 4, 5, and 6 people on a call from time zones all over the world.

And yes, if you’ve ever used Skype, you may have run into reliability issues. But for the longest time, it was the best bang for your buck. (Now rivaled by Google Hangouts. See below.)

HipChat is a private hosted chat service that is designed to help your team collaborate more efficiently.

As a business owner, you can set up a group chat with your team that you can always access and review.

Because of this HipChat ensures that your organization can avoid any miscommunication and redundancies. Unlike having a face-to-face virtual meeting using Hangouts where the entire team has to be present, Hipchat saves the conversation so that you and your team can upload and collaborate on documents and tasks at each person’s own convenience.

Hipchat also features a video chat that you can utilize from any computer or mobile device so you can converse with your team members while “on the go”. While you can use many other services to chat online, HipChat is one of the few that is intended strictly for business use.

There are times when you’re going to need to gather your team for a meeting. If you’re running your business on a budget, Google’s Hangouts might be the tool for you.

If you want to record your Hangout to view later on, you can use Hangouts on Air. This feature will reduce the amount to time you and your employees spend taking notes and make sure that you don’t miss anything. (Note: There is a privacy setting where you can choose not to display your Hangout publicly.)

Chanty is a simple business messenger for seamless communication and collaboration powered by AI. It helps small teams to become more productive by featuring instant messages with an unlimited searchable history, handy file sharing and uniting notifications from multiple services in a single place.

On a mission to humanize business processes Chanty goes even further. The AI algorithm predicts responses saving your time spent on typing. Workflow bring structure to conversations allowing team members to coordinate important tasks in a more efficient way. Audio and video calls, voice transcripts and integrations with popular services add extra points to this messenger. For now, Chanty is available in beta.

With Mailbird, you experience a seamless experience managing your online communication. Mailbird’s third party integrations allow you manage messenger platforms like Facebook right from the email client.

One of the biggest assets to Mailbird is it’s learning curve… or lack thereof. Unlike more complicated client’s like Outlook where you may never learn the entire application, Mailbird alleges that a user can learn the app within 5 minutes. It is designed for folks of any age and technology literacy to be able to learn it fast.

An endless online whiteboard for enterprise visual collaboration. Over 1 000 000 product managers, UX/UI designers, Agile coaches use it to create, co-design and collaborate building their workflow around a single tool. As of now, there are nine in-house integrations with RealtimeBoard: JIRA by Atlassian, Slack, Trello, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Google Drive, Google Contacts and Facebook.

RealtimeBoard can be used as a meeting room, which allows to collaborate 24/7 asynchronously or in real-time from any part of the world, making the process as transparent as possible.

Design Tools

Invision is an enterprise grade prototyping tool that enables users to upload designs, create actions such as button clicks, and gather feedback seamlessly from colleagues and customers right from within the app.

With Invision, you can manage your projects from a single dashboard. The dashboard will show you a breakdown of project status as well as comments collected. You can also integrate with various platforms to create a seamless design environment.

Another visual design collaboration tool that allows you to keep everyone up to speed, Concept Inbox ardently keeps track of versions so that team members and external stakeholders can return to a particular design at any point in time.

Project leads can get real time feedback on prototypes with in-context annotations and email notifications when someone makes a comment on a design.

Designed for smaller businesses, Cage allows freelancers and small teams the ability to share projects with clients and other collaborators.

Like the other tools, Cage will allow users to leave visual comments on the design. Cage also has a powerful project management tool that will enable you to assign and manage tasks with both clients and colleagues.

Red Pen is a fast feedback tool for visual teams. As a designer, you can get feedback from your colleagues as well as point and click to explain your thinking.

You can give access to your clients via a private link so that they too can give feedback. And each team member on a particular project will be kept up to date on the version, as well as the comments and feedback that was left by both colleagues and clients.

Documentation Tools

At Time Doctor, we live in Google Docs. For a remote company of over 60 employees, we have found that Google Docs is the easiest way to collaborate, share, edit, and eventually publish documents of all kinds.

Google Docs allows us to create blog posts (like this one), spreadsheets, and presentations. It’s all for free, which is a blessing for startups and small businesses located in various parts of the globe.

This is Microsoft’s free version of its original Office suite of tools. You get the core of Office: Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Onenote. When you combine it with Outlook.com, you essentially get the Office Home and Student suite.

There are certain limitations on the features that you get for free, however. For instance, if you wish to add a references section such as a table of contents and add citations, you will need to upgrade to the paid version.

There are also some font and formatting limitations as well. But, if you’re looking for basic documentation and editing tools, the free version will suit your needs just fine.

From its website: “Etherpad is a highly customizable Open Source online editor providing collaborative editing in really real-time.”

You can write articles, press releases, and to-do lists, with colleagues and clients all working and editing the same document in real time. And because it is open source, Etherpad is free to download.

Zoho Projects provides you with a set of project collaboration tools which helps the team members involved in the project to come together, plan, collaborate and get work done faster.

It helps you create project workspaces that will enable you to collaborate with teams in various geographical locations. You can give feedback, discuss projects in forums, and share a project calendar to increase productivity among team members.

File Sharing Tools

When you need safe storage for all of your files, this is the app to use. You will have 15 GB of free storage for photos, documents, and any other digital file you need to store for later use. Files are safe, but easily accessible by you and your team, and you can access them from any device. Organize items quickly and easily, and then share them and collaborate with your team.

Dropbox allows you to sync your work no matter where you are or what device you’re working on. While individuals can use Dropbox for free, the Dropbox most affordable business version allows more space (1 terabyte, or enough to store 250 movies) and more features, such as priority email support and higher sharing limits.

With Dropbox, when documents are edited each person on the team will get the latest and greatest version.

Hightail is a file sharing platform that allows for creative collaboration among teams. Hightail is designed to help you manage a project from start to finish.

You can bring clients in on projects, track changes, and ultimately speed up the pace at which your team completes projects. You can also implement admin level security measures to ensure the privacy of specific projects.

While many of the other file sharing sites on the list have evolved to more complicated platforms, MediaFire markets itself as a simple file sharing and storage platform. Media Fire focuses solely on bringing its users the best file sharing service possible.

This is perfect for the users who don’t want to pay for extra features.

This ensures that no matter which device you’re accessing your files, you will always know exactly where they are. There is no need to “remember” where a document lives on your laptop and in your SugarSync environment.

Project Management Tools

Asana is a cloud platform that enables all of your employees to log in no matter where they are, as long as they have a wifi connection. The dashboard consists of three panels in order to give you all of the data you need on a given project.

As a business owner, Asana will give you an overview to all projects currently going on in your organization. This is the information on the left hand side of the dashboard. Once you click on a particular project, the middle of the dashboard will allow you to zoom in on the tasks associated with the project. And finally, the right hand side of the dashboard will be even more granular. There you can see who is assigned to a particular task and when it is due.

Podio is a powerful tool that helps entrepreneurs and managers operate their businesses effectively.

As a remote team of over 50 employees operating in over a dozen countries in all conceivable time zones, tools like Podio make it possible for for us to get everyone moving in the same direction.

All managers need to know what tasks employees are working on, how employees are spending their work day, and can be assured that employees are able to easily collaborate amongst themselves, no matter where they are located.

Trello is a web-based tool that allows you to organize your projects using cards that are organized on a board. To conceptualize this, imagine writing tasks on Post It Notes and sticking them in columns on a wall. You can write on them, take them off of the wall, and move them around.

Each column represents a different part of the project. As you and your team make progress on a card, you move it across the board. This lets you see the status of everything you’re working on with just a quick glimpse at the board.

According to its website, with ProofHub you get plenty of options to plan everything in your projects and stay more productive at work. From adding people to assigning different roles to them and defining who’s who of the project, you can do it all with ProofHub.

You get a 30,000 foot view on important events with the help of native calendar. And, the option to set dependencies on tasks makes it even easier to plan your project activities.

Wrike allows you to break large tasks into smaller goals and manageable pieces. You can easily track each team member’s progress and individual contribution to the team.

Wrike’s reports provide easy to read data on how much time and money is being spent on a particular project so that you can ensure you come in under budget. This feature is extremely beneficial to agencies and other client service based businesses.

WorkflowMax is the project management tool for mid-sized client service firms. Think of WorkflowMax as a hub for various services such as accounting, billing, project management, lead management, creating quotes, and a whole host of other services required to run a client service business.

With WorkflowMax, you generate beautiful and robust reports that will allow you to make sure your projects, from start to finish, are delivered on time and under budget so that you can ensure each one of your clients is profitable for your business.

According to its website, Mavenlink exists “To serve professional service organizations with a more efficient, elegant, and profitable solution to manage their project-based business.”

Like WorkflowMax, Mavenlink is a hub for the various processes that go into a client service business.

Mavenlink realizes that projects in the “real world” are dynamic and ever changing. There is no linear progression. Mavenlink’s platform is flexible enough to accommodate the dynamics of projects that come from demanding clients.

Nimble combines your address book and social media contacts into a sales and marketing CRM solution. All contacts are linked with conversations you have had with prospects and customers, and their records are automatically filled with social information under one record. Nimble also has targeted marketing features such as group messaging for one-on-one authentic outreach and offers insights into who has opened or clicked in your message. Nimble browser extension allows you to work with Nimble alongside your webmail, on social media, or in any website.

SwiftKanban is a web-based visual tool for project management based on Kanban best suited for software development teams, IT Operations and DevOps teams, project managers or business functions. It offers easy visualization to manage team’s processes and works well for both co-located and distributed teams.

SwiftKanban offers support for Scrum, Iterative and other software development methods and also integrates well with existing Agile tools. With a highly visual Kanban board, projects teams can access a wide range of Kanban metrics and manage the flow of work and identify bottlenecks through visual cues.

Software Tools

At the time of this article, GitHub is the most popular software repository on the web. According to a March 2015 Wired article, GitHub is one of the top 100 most popular websites in the world and hosted 9 million software projects.

GitHub wraps a version control system called a Git where developers can host their projects for free as well as exchange and talk “code” with other developers.

Bitbucket is another large software repository platform and is brought to you by Atlassian, the same folks who own the JIRA and Hipchat brands. Unlike Github, Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories.

Where Github focuses on Opensource, Bitbucket is designed to help developers within enterprises to collaborate on projects.

With point-and-click annotation tools, Usersnap helps you report bugs where they happen: in your browser. No need to switch to a bug reporting application or to fill out endless forms. Bug tracking is now a picnic!

Gitlab is a web based git repository service (like Github and Bitbucket) that is written in the Ruby programming language.

According to Upwork “its permissions, branch protection, and authentication features are what really make it stand out. Teams can secure projects on a more granular level, and projects are kept even safer while they’re being worked on.”

Fogbugz allows developers to prioritize issues so that they can keep projects organized.

Fogbugz also makes it easy for customers to communicate with developers on feature requests and bugs so they have all the context they need to solve the pressing need of the customer without switching between multiple products.

And last but not least, Fogbugz takes a holistic approach to building (and selling software). You can collaborate with designers, marketers, and support staff to complete projects, not just other developers.

Which Tools do you use?

I get it. There’s absolutely no possible way that we could have found all of the tools that you use to collaborate and work remotely.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t curious about what you use.

So, if you have a favorite tool, whether we mentioned it or not, please share it with us in the comments section below.

Greg Digneo

Greg Digneo writes for TimeDoctor.com, a time monitoring and productivity monitoring software designed for tracking hours and productivity of remote teams. If you would like to see where you and your team are spending your time during work, then try TimeDoctor free for 30 days.

15 Comments

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Great list Greg, please also consider Brand Toolbox.
We have a stack of clients using this Brand and Digital Asset Management tool to manage their brand style guidelines, specification manuals, photo and digital asset libraries. It also allows teams to share and comments on content, assets and checklists.

What a solid list! In addition, I would also recommend Dead Drop Software. Dead Drop is a secure communication and collaboration platform for teams and businesses that work together. It is a cloud-based system for working on projects, sending messages, and managing files. Dead Drop comes with a fixed and flat rate of $79. This comes with unlimited projects, unlimited users, unlimited storage, unlimited EVERYTHING.

Hey, that’s a detailed list there. I’ve got to admit that you have gathered a superb collection of tools here. If I may take some liberty, I’d like to suggest ViduPM. This Project Management Software manages, tracks, schedules & plans your time effectively. It’d be great if you may add the same in the list here.
Do have a look at ViduPM (https://vidupm.com/)
Keep doing the good work!

Great list. ProofHub is another great management tool for teams. A great communication and collaboration for managing your teams, time and tasks. Should be on the list. I’d recommend you to give it a try.

You can also add on premise R-HUB web conferencing servers in the above list of Online Collaboration tools. It provides a simple and easy to use interface and works on all platforms viz Windows, MAC, Android, iOS etc.

Seems like a nice list. You should consider adding http://www.zipBoard.co to this list. zipBoard is a visual collaboration tool that let’s users annotate and collaborate in one place. It’s great to get a team in sync. And the best part is you can track issues or bugs via screenshots rather than having to describe it.